Tea in Korean is neither "tea" or "chai" after all. It is "cha". Very bad post.
Are any words the same in all languages?
281–290 of 511 posts
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Robot intuitively sounds like it could be a good candidate. I don't think "computer" is quite that universal, though. AFAIK it's something else at least in French ("ordinateur"), Swedish ("dator"), Norwegian ("datamaskin"), Finnish ("tietokone"; lit. "knowledge/data machine") and Estonian ("arvuti"). I think Chinese has its own unrelated word, too. And about half of the African languages that I can easily check in Wi…
Computer in Chinese is 电脑 (dian nao) literally "electric brain".
This is inaccurate. Computer is “计算机” （computing machine），while “电脑” mostly refers to PC, even though they are sometimes used interchangeably the latter is distinctively narrower than "computer" while the former is equivalent.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
"paradicsom" just goes to show that this article is confidently incorrect: > Exceptions: Italian uses pomodoro, and some other languages use a word similar to the Italian one. Mandarin Chinese is another exception! "paradicsom" is not similar to pomodoro, in either pronounciation or meaning. And if the author has made one so simple mistake, we have to assume there are many more with the more exotic languages.
Another example of this article being confidently wrong about tomato is Czech, where the word used is rajče or rajské jablko, the latter meaning "apple of paradise."
Same in Austrian German (Paradeiser) so perhaps something to do with it the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#284re: the Nahuatl origin of chocolate, my money is obviously on xocolatl.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linguistically, I don't think d and p are close at all. But a sibling comment also links to the Wikipedia entry for this common fallacy.
what? linguists would universally consider d and p extremely similar, they're near identical plosives
Plosives are a big category. "k" is also a plosive, but does not sound anything like a or
. d and p are plosives but are made using completely different parts of the mouth (dental vs labial). Perhaps some linguist will consider them "close" but "near identical" is almost certainly wrong, but I am happy to be proven wrong with a citation.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#286The word Email is the same in every language.
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#287These seem like very bad candidates. All are loan words, which is interesting, but we could go deeper if we're considering pineapple/ananas and coffee. And let's be real, words like robot and computer are mostly the same in this respect too, especially if we're considering taxi. But what about words that are more "native"? How about "mama" and "papa"? There are variations, but these seem to be pretty small and mostly…
Turkish has an interesting deviation from the pattern: the Turkish word for mama is 'anne'. Turkish dad's follow the usual pattern though with 'baba'.
The origin of "anne" is "ana" (/ˈa.na/), though, which is closer to "mama". Also it is hypothesized that "ana" was derived from the babble word "nana".
Interestingly "ana" replaced the older Turkish word "ög" around 8th-9th century which further deviates from the babble word, and is still used in modern Turkish words such as "öksüz" (without-mother, orphan).
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would probably be the case for Indo-European languages, but it's way too easy to find counterexamples from outside of those languages. In Japanese it's "iie" (いいえ), in Finnish it's "ei", and the latter shares roots with other Uralic languages which probably have something similar. I wouldn't be surprised if a whole bunch of African or Native American languages happened to have entirely unrelated words for "no",…
Even so, many of the languages have it similarly short, it either has n or o, or at least would rhyme in some way with no. Of course there are exceptions, but all the examples in this article are dumb because they're just mostly modern words where the english version of it just gets copied. I guess I'm just more interested in the old stuff.
Fair enough. I think loan words from a single source language are really the only ones that could potentially be found to be the same in all languages, though.
There are several large language families outside of the Indo-European one that are distinct enough that it's hard to see nearly all of them actually sharing the same words except for relatively modern loan words, or possibly onomatopoeia.
It's not particularly surprising that something like "no" would be short in most languages, considering that it's a very common interjection, but that doesn't mean it's the same.
(The top examples in the article are originally from Arabic and Nahuatl, and the spread of both words is old enough that it predates the hegemony of English, and I think many languages probably got their equivalent of "chocolate" via other Indo-European languages instead. I'm not sure the other examples are actually cases of an English version being copied either. Spanish, German, French, Portuguese etc. were significant enough international languages not that many centuries ago that English probably wasn't most likely conduit for loan words that are nowadays commonly shared. It certainly wasn't the only one. Of course nowadays it tends to be a predominant one.)
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#289Perhaps, it would be more useful for students if foreign language courses start with explaining one thing that is well known to linguists, but maybe does not have enough recognition by a wide audience. Most European languages are at some extent just dialects of the same common language[1]. And most of the words we use in distinct languages are (at some extent) just different pronunciations of the same vocabulary. Thi…
Before I had clicked the link I thought you were not referring to Proto-Indo-European but to Standard Average European — how many of the European languages (particularly the western European languages) have peculiarities in grammar and syntax that are not explained by descent, but by areal features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European
Re: Are any words the same in all languages?
#290These seem like very bad candidates. All are loan words, which is interesting, but we could go deeper if we're considering pineapple/ananas and coffee. And let's be real, words like robot and computer are mostly the same in this respect too, especially if we're considering taxi. But what about words that are more "native"? How about "mama" and "papa"? There are variations, but these seem to be pretty small and mostly…
Hindi/Gujarati/Sanskrit has mata and pita.